IN ADDITION TO DEGREE of value, however, there are productive areas that aren’t valued at all. Take the economic vacuum called “women who don’t work.” It’s a form of semantic slavery that industrialized countries reserve for homemakers (in spite of the fact that homemakers in the United States work longer hours for less pay, and have more likelihood of being replaced by a younger worker, than any other category). Agricultural countries reserve it for women who are productive in nonmonetary ways, or are not considered “primary producers” (even though they grow most or all of the food their families eat). If I had internalized the lower economic value of my own work, and even underpaid some “women’s work” myself, how much deeper did it cut to be economically nonexistent?

The truth is that almost every woman knows this economic invisibility in some part of her life. Whether or not she is in the paid labor force, a major part of her energy is probably devoted to productive work within the family and household, work that isn’t counted as work at all. It’s a reality of patriarchal economic systems, both in capitalist countries like the United States, where the invisibility of homemaking leads to employed women having two jobs, and in the socialist past or hybrid present of countries in East Europe and Russia, where so-called emancipation meant the right to do two jobs, one visible and one not.

To get a fix on how big this invisible part of the economy might be, I went back to look at Galbraith’s calculations: The U.S. gross national product—the total value of the nation’s annual output of goods and services—would go up by 26 percent if homemakers’ labor were included at replacement cost. In Canada, with a population only one tenth as large, Statistics Canada, the national information-gathering body, estimated the cost of replacing one year of homemakers’ work at $200 billion, almost 40 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product (which is the GNP minus income from a country’s resources that are owned by nonresidents).* In both cases, such pink-collar jobs as cook (not the predominantly male one of chef) and child care worker had been used to calculate homemakers’ pay. When the Canadian Human Rights Commission used “equal pay for work of equal value” tables instead, homemakers’ worth turned out to be comparable to that of middle-level supervisors, senior specialists, and such nonsupervisory professions as therapist and social worker; jobs that paid better because they were also done by men. Homemakers’ worth was raised by 200 to 300 percent.25 Even so, neither method calculated double and triple time for homemakers who work a sixteen-hour day—or more.

The same economic nonexistence is a problem in agricultural countries where fewer women work in the marketplace as defined. A 1993 World Bank conference of seventy nongovernmental organizations from around the globe concluded that 50 percent of the world’s food is produced by women’s labors, and that women are “the chief organizers of community efforts to combat poverty and hunger.”26 Yet their work frequently doesn’t show up in economic figures at all, and thus is less likely to be part of economic planning—nor are they themselves consulted or included in the usual decision-making process of agricultural policy. Hazel Henderson, political economist and futurist, estimates that even in industrial countries, about 50 percent of all production is unpaid—“i.e., do-it-yourself home construction and repairs, food growing, household maintenance, parenting children and volunteering”—and that “in developing countries, up to 75 percent of all production can comprise such unpaid work, particularly in subsistence-based agricultural societies.”27

Thanks to our new ability to measure worldwide suffering with computers, the United Nations has come up with conclusions like this often cited one: Women do a third of all the paid work in the world, and two thirds of all work, paid and unpaid, yet receive only 10 percent of the world’s salaries, and own only one percent of its property.

In order to keep from being paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of that U.N. statement—and also to get good and angry—we should look at the forms those statistics take in everyday life:

• Water carried through pipes has an economic value, but water carried for miles in jars on women’s heads is usually given no value at all.*

• What a homemaker buys has value because it has been produced for wages, but the hours she spends waiting in line and shopping to buy it—for instance, a whole day in line to buy cooking gas in Bolivia, several hours a day for food in Russia, and eight hours of shopping per family each week in European countries—have no value.

• Purchased, processed, and shipped food contributes to the GDP/GNP—the more processed the food and the greater the distance it’s shipped, the greater its value to the gross national product—but food fresh from a kitchen garden or a home-tended field does not.

• A woman taking care of her own children is a person who is “not working”—which is why welfare, initially conceived as a widowed mothers’ allowance, is treated as a handout, but unemployment compensation, which involves doing nothing at all, is not—though a person or an institution raising the same children if that mother died or deserted would be “working” and getting much more than a welfare-level payment.

• Fuel gathered by hand—a major occupation of women, whether it’s brush on the African veld or cow dung patties in an Indian village—has no value within the GDP/GNP, but the same fuel bought in a market would be counted.

• Bills and taxes paid by an accountant have a double economic life—one for the transactions themselves and one for the job of paying them—but bills paid by a household manager have only one.

• Feeding formula to a baby increases the GDP/GNP—though it’s less nutritious and immunizing than breast milk and dangerous where contaminated water sources must be used to mix it, not to mention having no contraceptive value for the mother—but breastfeeding, which is usually healthier for the baby and perhaps the mother, has no value at all. Indeed, taking a sick baby to the doctor enriches the GDP/GNP, but having a well baby does not.

• A woman taking care of an aging relative at home (or a man doing this “women’s work”) is not counted in the GDP/GNP, yet in a nursing home, the same relative and her (or his) caretaker would become a job-creating asset.

• Charitable donations of cash or other assets are deductible according to U.S. tax law, as in many countries, but time given to charitable work is not. In 1980 alone, the GNP failed to include $18 billion in volunteer hours worked by 52.7 million women.28 Is it an accident that the monetary form of contribution preferred by males is deductible but the 90-percent-female one of giving time is not?

• A “primary producer” (the agricultural version of “head of household”) may have the value of nonmonetary acts imputed into the GDP/GNP (e.g., the estimated value of farm animals butchered to feed the family), while his wife, the “secondary producer,” does not (e.g., the plantains and yams she grows as family staples). Indeed, a wife may grow, cook, process, and preserve food, carry water, gather fuel, make pots and weave baskets, repair the home, raise domestic animals, weave cloth, make clothing, nurse the sick, and bury the dead—not to mention reproducing and socializing the next generation of workers—and still be called “unproductive.”

Such is the power of classical monetary thinking that I, like many others, assumed for years the only way to value the universe of work rendered invisible under the homemaking umbrella was to arrive at some system for paying homemakers wages. That raised the troubling prospect of depersonalizing and devaluing this most personal of work by counting only its replacement value, extending current wage inequities into the home by calculating a homemaker’s worth in pink-collar wages, increasing the husband’s power by turning him into a pseudo employer, or following the example of authoritarian governments that pay “hero mothers” subsistence wages to stay home and produce more workers and soldiers. Perhaps there could be the choice of collecting wages if the homemaker wished, but it’s not the only way. In fact, there are many other areas in which value is imputed, even if no cash changes hands, and standards of comparable worth could be applied to the tasks of homemaking in a new way, as we’ve seen from Statistics Canada’s calculations. That allows unpaid productive work in the home to be valued at the same rates, whether done by women or men, and gives policy planners a more realistic sense of the work that contributes to the life of a country. It also increases choice, for both men and women, by taking away the economic penalty. (Who knows, giving the imputed value of a middle-level manager to a homemaker might encourage more men to take on or equally share this work.) Furthermore, many economists say the process of imputing value is possible and desirable, especially those who live in parts of the world where the habit of “disappearing” agricultural and other productive work done largely by women has even more disastrous results for economic planning than it does for industrial countries that leave out homemakers and other unpaid producers. As Raj Krishna, a distinguished Indian economist, has written:

Every bit of quasi-productive work can be valued. … The part of the net output of tangible goods collected or produced (fuel, fish, meat, clothes, fruits, vegetables, milk and milk products, etc.) which is not already included in the national product, can also be valued at their market prices. … Many components of the national product are currently imputed by national accounts statisticians with similar or worse procedures. … Therefore, there should be no objections to another exercise in imputation to assess women’s economic contribution more appropriately.29

In fact, many nations even impute the worth of such nonmonetary, off-the-books, hidden, or illegal parts of their economies as bartered goods and services, child labor and other work in the subsistence-level agricultural or indigenous economy, the goods and services supplied by charitable institutions, and even the huge underground economy of black-market goods, illegal drugs, prostitution, and other criminal transactions. Whether or not they’re included within the sacred confines of the GDP/GNP, these bodies of information are available to be used as the bases of informed policy decisions. It’s not an overstatement to say that many industrialized countries, including the United States, know more about the worth of the illegal drug trade than the legal homemaking trade—and accordingly, make more informed policy decisions about the former than the latter. For example, no government agency calculated how many homemakers or others were at home to take care of those who were deinstitutionalized when a particular mental institution, home for the aged, or program for the disabled was closed in a community—which was one of the many reasons why this society was blindsided by what is lumped together as “the homeless problem.” Other disastrous decisions are constantly being made in this information vacuum. As Berit Ås, former member of Parliament in Norway and representative to the United Nations, reported:

Women researchers are concerned about the fact that growth in many sectors of the economy takes place by adding more work to the existing unpaid work performed by women. For instance, all over the Western world, supermarkets replace small retailers. This requires housewives to increase the time needed for shopping. A Swedish study revealed that a majority of women customers had no car at their disposal. Either they had to shop every day and walk longer distances or they had to carry heavier burdens and use bus transportation when it was available. Reducing the number of sales personnel in the supermarkets and hiring unqualified people make it necessary for housewives to inform themselves more thoroughly by reading labels and comparing products. … American studies of consumerism have shown that the average shopping time per family amounts to eight hours weekly compared to about two hours per week only a few decades ago.30

Obscuring the visibility of women’s work are the absent or very poor records of it, census categories that simply don’t fit or that perpetuate invisibility by focusing on the “head of household” or “productive worker,” and even census takers who ask male heads of households about their wives’ economic contribution, thus getting prideful but inaccurate replies. Patriarchal cultures steeped in the semantic slavery of “women who don’t work” won’t easily make the necessary changes. As far as I can tell in the United States, for instance, the value of a homemaker’s productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar, and the big number was attributed to the husband’s pain and suffering.

Personally, I like the option of treating the full-time homemaker and her or his wage-earning spouse as partners at least as equal as a business partnership—as we are so often assured marriage is—and crediting the homemaker with half of her (or his) spouse’s total income. Especially at middle and upper levels, this could help compensate for the fact that, as Galbraith has pointed out, consumption increases and elaborates as income goes up, thus demanding a “consumption manager” with more time and expertise.31 Anything less than an economic partnership enforces a very intimate inequality: Do we really want a family in which a megabucks entrepreneur has a spouse valued as, say, a social director? On the other hand, the tax meaning of this partnership principle would create tax breaks for families with high incomes and nothing at all for the poor—unless combined with income maintenance programs.

But the truth is: Almost anything would be better than what we have right now. A homemaker in an ongoing marriage has the legal right to only room and board, even if “full-time” means “all the time.” That right disappears if her husband loses his job.* A one-in-two divorce rate makes her not only most likely to be replaced by a younger worker, but also least likely to get unemployment benefits, job retraining, a pension, or even the dignity of recognition as a displaced homemaker. A few much-publicized, atypically big divorce settlements may be used for antiwoman jokes. (Q: “Why is it so expensive to divorce a wife?” A: “Because it’s worth it.”) But in reality, only about 10 percent of divorced women are awarded “temporary maintenance,” as alimony is now called, and one study found that the average such payment was only $4,000 a year.32 Furthermore, the average child support awarded by the courts is less than half the amount necessary to support a child, and only half of these court-ordered or otherwise agreed upon payments are actually paid.

All this was summed up in Lenore Weitzman’s famous statistic from The Divorce Revolution: Women with dependent children experience a 73 percent drop in standard of living after a divorce, while their ex-husbands’ living standard goes up by 42 percent.33 The colloquial summing up is simpler: If women have young children, they are only one man away from welfare.

Yet if two homemakers were to cross the street and work for each other’s husbands, they would be entitled to an eight-hour day and a forty-hour week, Social Security, disability pay, and unemployment compensation—and perhaps paid vacations, transferrable health benefits, and a retirement plan (not to mention a better legal safeguard against violence, which also has economic value). Something is very wrong here.

Furthermore, whether in agricultural or industrial countries, none of the above calculations include pregnancy, birth, lactation, and the reality of women’s share in reproducing and nurturing the next generation. (Only Hazel Henderson included parenting.) Reproductive labor is not imputed positively, though millennia of wet nurses and, more recently, surrogate mothers have given reproduction a monetary value—if only out of desperation and lack of economic alternatives. Nor is it valued negatively, though in other circumstances, at least an “opportunity cost” might be used to put a number on salaried work lost. Only those few women who receive paid pregnancy leave—less than 4 percent of U.S. women working full-time for large companies, and an even lower percentage of those working part-time or in small concerns—are given the negative value of a “disability” for childbearing.34 As feminist theorist Christine Littleton has pointed out: “what makes pregnancy a liability rather than, say, an additional ability, is the structure of work, not reproduction.”35 The truth is that a salaried worker with a sports injury probably has a better chance of being counted in the GDP/GNP than a woman giving birth to the next generation. The reproduction of farm animals has an economic value, but the reproduction of human beings does not.

Sociologist Maria Mies explains the invisibility of reproductive labor this way: “All the labour that goes into the production of life, including the labour of giving birth to a child, is not seen as the conscious interaction of a human being with nature, that is, a truly human activity, but rather as an activity of nature.”36 In other words, women are assumed to be in the grip of forces beyond our control, even though we are expected to be individually responsible for the consequences of our reproductive acts—the worst of both worlds. It’s one more motive for women to control our own bodies. Only the ability to say “no” forces others (as well as ourselves) to experience “yes” as a conscious act.

This is the deep economics of patriarchy: the valuing of male-style “production” but not female-style “reproduction.” Women aren’t supposed to be free agents who can bargain with our reproductive cartel. That’s something patriarchal politicians recognize every time they vote against their own monetary self-interest by refusing to spend a small sum on contraception and abortion as part of the health care system in the U.S., knowing that unwanted births will cost hundreds of times more in the long run. For women to have the power of choice, the power to decide if our bodies will reproduce, would mean that we had taken control of the means of reproduction—and this control is the bottom line of patriarchy.

Even the supposedly sacred and priceless bodily products that men possess—say, blood or sperm—can be sold with little social disapproval, but women are routinely condemned for trying to control our bodies through abortion or even contraception, much less to profit from what they can uniquely do.* Whether or not one thinks these transactions should be legal, the growing reality of birth technology, according to the Glover Report to the European Commission, is that “Some hospitals and sperm banks pay semen donors, while egg donors are rarely paid”37—a truly stunning fact, since the collection process for the former involves masturbation and for the latter, body-invading semisurgery. In addition, one of the most frequent arguments of antiabortion groups opposed to the use of fetal tissue for research, even tissue from spontaneous abortions, is that women might get pregnant and have abortions for that purpose—a lack of empathy for the reality of the experience of pregnancy and abortion, as well as a lack of trust in women as ethical beings. From right to left of patriarchal economics, the common thread seems to be the fear of women’s power to control and profit from our natural monopolies and thus to achieve a balance of power with men.

It’s no wonder that many women especially feel bored, mystified, or generally turned off by economics. In her landmark 1988 book, If Women Counted, Marilyn Waring, former member of Parliament in New Zealand and international advocate of attributing economic value to unpaid productive and reproductive work as well as to the environment, explained this as a rational judgment: “ ‘economics anxiety1 … is also evidence of a quite sane alienation from the subject matter. This occurs when I tell any housewife that she is unoccupied, economically inactive, and doesn’t work. If a system treats you like that, you don’t spend much time examining it.”38

Galbraith explained why women can study economics and emerge brainwashed instead of radicalized:

That many women are coming to sense that they are instruments of the economic system is not in doubt. But their feeling finds no support in economic writing and teaching. On the contrary, it is concealed, and on the whole with great success, by modern neoclassical economics—the everyday economics of the textbook and classroom. This concealment is neither conspiratorial nor deliberate. It reflects the natural and very strong instinct of economics for what is convenient to influential economic interest—for what I have called the convenient social virtue. … First, there is the orthodox identification of an increasing consumption of goods and services with increasing happiness. … Second, the tasks associated with the consumption of goods are, for all practical purposes ignored. … The third requisite for the concealment of women’s economic role is the avoidance of any accounting for the value of household work. … To keep these matters out of the realm of statistics is also to help keep them innocuously within the sacred domain of the family and the soul. … The separate identities of men and women are merged into the concept of the household. The inner conflicts and compromises of the household are not explored; by nearly universal consent, they are not the province of economics. … One notices, at this point, an interesting convergence of economics with politics. It has long been recognized that women are kept on a political leash primarily by urging their higher commitment to the family. Their economic role is also concealed and protected by submerging them in the family or household. … Once women see that they serve purposes which are not their own, they will see that they can serve purposes which are their own.39

It also helps if women realize that we are experiencing a larger problem, and thus have allies. The process by which monetary values have been used to render women’s productive and reproductive work invisible is very like the colonial process by which the productive work of indigenous economies has been rendered invisible. In South Africa, for instance, taxes were imposed on land, livestock, even owning a dog. With no way to get cash in a largely agricultural, non-cash economy, formerly self-sufficient groups were forced to go to work for wages—whether as domestics or in factories and mines. An underpaid labor force was created—just by imposing a monetary system and deciding what it would value. Similarly, women’s productive and reproductive work in the home is given no monetary value, and in a cash economy she either becomes dependent on her husband, who works for wages, or she herself must do two jobs, one paid and one unpaid. The household that was a unit of production, even in agricultural patriarchies, becomes a unit only of consumption—at least, in limited economic terms. It’s another reason why the analogy between many or most females and countries recovering from colonial economic systems makes such political sense. It’s also why women in those parts of the world—like racial and other groups that have been colonized within this and other countries—usually must struggle up through a double layer of forces rendering their actions undervalued or invisible—an indigenous patriarchy and also an imported one.

In spite of major differences in degree, the kinds of economic problems from which women suffer are amazingly similar across national boundaries. Whether it’s Kenya or Kansas, for instance, the (mostly male) workers who grow crops for sale are the ones who get government help with agricultural methods, irrigation, labor-saving equipment, low-interest loans, and the like—even if their crops are the wrong ones and have to be stockpiled or destroyed—while the (mostly female) workers whose food growing, processing, and preserving may be just as important to the family, and whose diverse skills, bartered goods, piecework, and “egg money” keep it going, get no such help. Especially in Africa and other agricultural areas where men have been forced off the land and into faraway salaried jobs, “unproductive” women may be the sole family support for most of the year, yet they are left with the most labor-intensive methods. Whether it’s Nairobi or New York, the processed food, relatives in nursing homes, and salaried hours in a woman’s day go right on getting slender economic recognition, while the subsistence gardens, home caretaking of relatives, and unsalaried human maintenance in a woman’s day get none at all.

There’s a certain clarity and relief to putting women’s position in economic terms—to looking at the economic world as if women mattered. There is less self-blame and more energizing anger once we realize that patriarchal systems “disappear” or undervalue women’s labor in order to have an unpaid or underpaid means of production, and “disappear” reproduction so it doesn’t yield power as a female cartel.

Looking at international economic life brings to mind the ancient image of the world riding on the back of a turtle—only in reality, the turtle is a woman. She inches along, laboring just beneath the level of economic visibility, often blaming herself for not being able to bear more weight. Occasionally, she retreats into her shell, as if withdrawal were the only form of rebellion. But only when she upsets its balance will the world roll off her back.

* I’ll use GDP/GNP for the concept of a nation’s gross product here, unless one applies specifically. Countries tend to choose the one that puts a better spin on their situation. A developing country where multinational and other foreign investments make the GNP much bigger might prefer it. On the other hand, the U.S. switched to GDP in 1992, perhaps to make the trade deficit look smaller. Are you beginning to see economics as a very subjective process? Well, here’s another problem. One of those figures divided by the adult population yields per capita income, even if the reality consists of a hundred billionaires plus the poor. There has yet to be a widely accepted poverty gap measure to prevent this masking. According to current economic values, there is often a big distance between what you see and what you get.

* Of seventy developing countries, Derek Blades, a statistician for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, found only six that included water carrying as productive work in their national accounts—one of which, Kenya, included it only when carried by a man.

* As Gail Koff, a founder of the populist law firm Jacoby & Myers, explained in Love and the Law, “Generally speaking there is a legal obligation to provide necessities for one’s spouse. These necessities include food, clothing, and a roof over one’s head. This obligation to support is dependent, of course, on there being money to do so. If there is no money, the wife would not be able to take him to court to force him to provide for his family. ... All the law actually demands is that either spouse prevent the other from becoming a public charge.”

* As law professor Patricia Williams reports in The Alchemy of Race and Rights: “On the bulletin board just outside my office, there hangs a notice from the department of obstetrics and gynecology of the University of Wisconsin. It offers fifty dollars for every semen specimen ‘we are able to use’ in an artificial insemination program. Donors must be under thirty-five years old and have a college degree. I wonder every time I enter my office at this market of selling sperm … [of] probably-blond college graduates.” In addition to a difference of value by race, what would happen if women students were benefiting from selling their ova to be introduced into other wombs or scientific petri dishes? Would they be treated with the same casual approval?